iPhone 5 hardware teardown reveals good news for phone droppers

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With a level of dedication rarely seen in today’s commoditized consumer electronics market, one hardware hacker has flown all the way to Australia to get his hands on the iPhone 5 some 16 hours before it goes on sale in the US. This hardware hacker isn’t some kind of queue-camping Apple zealot, however: He’s a teardown specialist. He flew to Australia… so that he could tear the iPhone 5 to pieces, just so we can check out its juicy internals.

In this case, we’re talking about Luke Soules, the co-founder of iFixit. Ostensibly, iFixit opens up and disassembles devices so that it can produce free DIY repair guides — but for most of us, these guides are simply the best way of seeing what’s inside the latest and greatest gadgets, such as the iPhone 5. Let’s dive in!

iPhone 5 teardown

Starting from the front, the iPhone 5 is once again assembled back-to-front — something that hasn’t been seen since the iPhone 3GS. This means that you only have to remove two screws from the bottom of the iPhone 5, and then the screen comes right out (with the aid of a suction cup). This makes it very easy to replace a broken iPhone 5 screen, unlike the iPhone 4 and 4S (which had to be almost completely disassembled before you could access the display assembly).

Once the display assembly has been removed, most of the phone’s internals are laid bare: A new 3.8V 1440mAh 5.45 watt-hour lithium-ion battery, made by Sony. The iPhone 5’s battery is marginally larger and more powerful than the iPhone 4S, which came in at 3.7V/1432mAh/5.3 watt-hours. On the right hand side of the case is the logic board, which, as we’ve come to expect, is one of the densest collections of computer chips ever seen.

So you have some idea of scale, the metallic object in the middle is the nano-SIM assembly — and a nano-SIM is about 1cm wide. This means that the Qualcomm MDM9615M 28nm radio (an all-in-one chip providing LTE connectivity), to the right of the nano-SIM enclosure, is about half a centimeter square. The A6 SoC, to the left, is just over one square centimeter. The chips on the far left (touchscreen controllers, an accelerometer) are tiny.

Drilling down into the A6 SoC, we still don’t know exactly what’s going on inside, but iFixit seems to concur that Apple has indeed made its own core, rather than using standard ARM Cortex-A9 or A15 designs. As you may know, the A6, and the A5 before it, are package-on-package designs, where there’s actually a memory chip stuck on top of the CPU/GPU core. In this case, the iFixit teardown shows Elpida LPDDR2 RAM — while the Apple keynote showed an A6 with Samsung RAM. It has been known for a while that Apple is trying to reduce its reliance on Samsung’s foundry business — but even so, the main A6 SoC is almost certainly built on Samsung’s 32nm HKMG process.

Rounding out the teardown: iFixit reveals a slightly modified camera unit (and finds that the sapphire lens cover is indeed scratch-resistant); the chamfered edge is pretty, but quite easy to scuff; and the iPhone 5 has no less than three microphones — one by the forward-facing camera (for FaceTime calls), one at the bottom for normal calls, and one on the back of the phone to aid with noise cancellation. For more details, be sure to read the full iFixit teardown.

Overall, iFixit gives the iPhone 5 a 7 out of 10 repairability rating — an improvement on the iPhone 4S (6 out of 10), but it still loses marks for having highly integrated components that can’t be replaced individually (but hey, that’s the price of miniaturization). The MacBook Pro with Retina display , incidentally, scored just 1 out of 10.

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It’s good to see the Macbook Pro Retina isn’t a sure sign that future Apple products will all have glued in components that are likely to break if someone wants to replace a battery or screen, or even microphones and speaker…

Keep up the good articles…

It’s nice to see you are proofing your articles before submission, more carefully now.

Thank you for the effort. :)

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